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Comment by SpikeGronim | Hacker News Reader

Most people aren't good at programming, at least until you train them. It's hard to convince women to spend ten years becoming excellent programmers when their peers disrespect and harass them. I've never seen credible evidence that women's brains "lack the wiring" - that's an awfully Victorian era sentiment. The fundamental problem here is with the behavior of men in the field of computer science.

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> It's hard to convince women to spend ten years becoming excellent programmers when their peers disrespect and harass them.

The same thing happened to me, only I started at 13 so I was more poorly equipped to deal with it. I learned anyway, because computers mesmerized me, and nothing that happened away from the keyboard could ever change that. Anyone capable of walking away really should, and go find their calling elsewhere, because this isn't it.

If I were interested in becoming a cook, I would take the classes and become a cook.

If I were interested in becoming a dancer, I would damn well become a dancer.

You can't just say it's the mens' fault. That is disingenuous and insulting to me as a male programmer.

The fundamental problem has nothing to do with men: it's that women aren't interested at all in computers. They're interested in babies, families, and things that are warm, cuddly and emotional. I'm not being sexist, I am quoting my girlfriend.

Your girlfriend is sexist then.

You are being sexist - you're overgeneralizing from one example (your girlfriend).

I didn't mean to insult you. I did mean to say that the aggregate behavior of many men has discouraged many women from participating in CS. That's not disingenuous, it's a fact supported by evidence.

"when their peers disrespect and harass them"

That's pretty damning accusation you're making for programmers everywhere. Do you have citations?

Yes, I have a citation[1]. I've also got anecdotal evidence from studying computer science at Stuyvesant High School and Carnegie Mellon University. To be clear, I didn't mean that programmers everywhere disrespect and harass women. I meant that sufficiently many programmers act this way for it to have a negative effect on female CS participation.

1. http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/there-sexual-hara...

EDITED TO ADD: where's your citation for the "brain wiring" comment above?

http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2007/09/why_arent_mor...

"Mental rotation tasks (see this CogDaily post), which require working with a three-dimensional representation of an object, have been found to have very large sex differences favoring males"

Thanks for the citation. That same article says that "at least one study has found that it's possible to teach these visuospatial skills." I can interpret the result "males in the study did better at mental rotation tasks" to mean "males brains are wired better" or "males have better math educations". Both interpretations fit the study evidence as presented.

The 3rd part of the linked article even says:

"So it appears that there are a wide variety of social factors that affect (or are affected by) sex differences in math and science. Because of limitations in the way these studies can be controlled, it's difficult to say that discrimination or differential treatment cause the sex differences we see in math and science."

Overall, the linked articles do not support the hypothesis that "men's brains are wired better".

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